Lantentine

The glassbox is the saving grace of this game. I'm keen to know how a city will develop with it.

Best post I've read in a while. The best type of polls are those implying EA is evil!

I'm going to hold my reservations about no-terraforming. Call me boring but terrain never did much to me - I much rather preferred seeing the city itself grow and evolve on a convenient coastal plain rather than cutting ugly terraces into mountains. However, I do want some variation in terrain. Put it this way - if we get varying climactic conditions (snow and desert would be awesome, and thinking fancifully, so would a tropical / pacific island setting as well) and interesting, varying terrain, I won't mind that I can't change it myself. I'll just adapt to the new terrain, or just create another region if the old one was too unpleasant. However, from what I've seen, it isn't promising. The terrain does look awfully boring and temperate. What is especially ugly are those vast, treeless, open plains between cities. They really need to sort that out. Adding rivers, fields, forests, ridges, mountains or gorges would sort that out.

To what extent can we view and manage people commuting from one city to another? In Simcity 4 it was very difficult to see how many sims were commuting, and thus it was difficult to create a city well integrated with other cities - you just had to guess... Edit - Separated questions in order to make voting easier!

Exactly how many resources are there in this latest installment of Simcity? A recent article suggested we got things as complex as cars, but so far we have only been told about oil and coal pretty much.

One of the biggest things I want to see in Simcity is relatively 'late game' (obviously it can't be late game because it's a sandbox - but I mean after many hours of hard work and good planning) transit options, such as very efficient, visually attractive and comfortable (Sims like it!) mag-lev / anti-gravity train but which costs a vast, vast amount of money. Or perhaps you can steadily upgrade your road network to be computerised so all cars travel in 'herds' and traffic is greatly reduced, etc.

I'm not entirely sure if I agree with you about sales in the developing world getting damaged by 'preaching green.' I mean, obviously if Maxis is going to take the "Its the developing world that is doing the damage' - then yes - that would damage sales - but it wouldn't if they made it clear that the environment is everyone's responsibility. I don't think anyone in a developing nation who owns this game is going to see a wind-farm or a ordinance that makes heavy industry suffer slightly and be insulted. Additionally, whether we like to admit it or not, ultimately sales are going to be affected by the developed world not buying the game due to a lack of environmental simulation / consequences compared to the developed world buying it because the game does reflect what really happens if you don't look after the planet properly. All I would ask myself from Maxis on this topic was yes - a full pollution simulation and the consequences - but also another route to take aside from clean industry to have low pollution. Perhaps technologies not entirely dissimilar to those seen in Anno 2070 but only at immense cost and late in the game.

Some sort of regional court would be an interesting and fun thing to have - but Maxis would have to be extremely careful implementing it. It can go both ways: You set up a region with random players over the internet. Everyone gets along in a friendly competition until some troll / uber-keen player comes along and starts making trouble, and ruining everyone else's enjoyment. This is where a punishment system would be beneficial. You set up a region with random players over the internet. Everyone is competitive and / or a troll. Sometimes they are sneaky trolls - they let you build up an impressive city (perhaps reliant on their exports - if they really are the troll of trolls) and then back-stab you with all sorts of nasties and trading taxes, etcetera, ruining your city. There is no punishment for the troll. Or alternatively, the punishments are forced compensation via trade, or fines that are distributed to the over regional cities. If you were to have the best and most successful city, then the other players could gang up on you, accuse you unfairly of doing something and then proceed to leech of your talent at Simcity through fines, making the game feel like no fun at all.